Dear
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Perhaps Chicago cartoonist Chris Ware never fully developed a sense of object permanence. His Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth comic strip, which appears regularly in New City, depicts a world of continuous creation, where people are dead one week and alive the next, where past encounters between characters bear no relevance to their present situations, where personal history generally extends back no farther than a few minutes. In the first collection of Jimmy Corrigan strips, Ware completely reinvents the title character in each episode. At first Corrigan is a young boy trying to manufacture a surrogate father to replace the one who deserted him and his mother. A page later he’s an old man transported through death to the gates of heaven, where the keeper of the Big Book of Souls asks for a bribe to let Corrigan pass. A few pages later Corrigan is a middle-aged adult who tries to commit suicide out of despair over his mother’s recent death–but not before arguing with her over the phone.
If Ware weren’t drawing comics, he might well be writing scripts for Doorika. Like all of Doorika’s bewildering, hypnotic, highly disjointed theater pieces, Ware’s comics rarely present coherent narratives, opting instead for a series of bold, disquieting images. Like Doorika’s director Erika Yeomans, Ware often creates playful scenarios out of mundane events that seem to go nowhere. And like Doorika’s bleak theatrical worlds, Ware’s troubling pen-and-ink concoctions–typically involving lovers or family members unable to connect on any meaningful level–have a poignant emotional aftereffect. In short, Ware and Doorika are a match made in heaven.
The characters in Dear, as in Ware’s comics, want desperately to recognize one another. But they seem unable to do so unless everything in the world remains unchanged forever. “People in the suburbs don’t dress like that!” a frazzled mother tells the children she no longer seems to know. “Up to age 12, you loved Mom,” says a sister to a brother she can’t understand any longer. “You make everyone feel good, that’s what I heard,” says a man to an imaginary person, as though that one sentence describes everything that person is or ever could be. No matter where these characters turn, they seem bewildered by one another’s inconsistencies. One little girl bursts into sobs because she wants her old dog Belvedere back. She can’t understand that Belvedere isn’t gone, he’s just been shaved.
